Realism’s radical roots

Unfortunately, present-day theoretical blinders still block a proper view of the accomplishments of Realism’s mid-century representatives. Yet the early Realist embrace of international political (as well as social) reform should not in fact prove surprising. The dominant figures in the classical Realist debate on global reform described below were all at least initially associated with the political left. Accurately noting that many of classical Realism’s most influential figures were German and German-Jewish émigrés from Nazism, the conventional interpretation of Realism underlines the role of continental and Germanic ideas of power politics, which the Realists are widely understood as having imported into especially US political discourse after World War II.Footnote 5 The classical Realists were indeed preoccupied with German political and intellectual currents. Yet the so-called ‘German tradition’ out of which vital strands in early Realism emerged was hardly that of Bismarck or conservative Realpolitik, but to a significant extent that of the Weimar left. A first-generation German–American with a keen eye for political and intellectual trends in his ancestral homeland, Niebuhr, for example, was closely linked to Paul Tillich and his band of self-described (non-Marxist) ‘religious socialists’, mostly Protestant radicals who astutely pointed to the normative gaps of classical Marxism and sought a creative synthesis of socialism and religion.Footnote 6 A student of the social democratic Viennese jurist Hans Kelsen, the German-Jew Herz was involved in émigré socialist politics during the 1930s and remained a social democrat throughout his career (Herz, Reference Herz1984: 106). Another Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany, Morgenthau, had been a left-leaning Weimar labor lawyer and protégé of Hugo Sinzheimer, the architect of the Weimar Constitution’s expressly social democratic provisions (Scheuerman, Reference Scheuerman2009: 11–39). Although never a socialist, Morgenthau identified strongly with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and was a longstanding member of many left-liberal (in the US sense) political organizations (e.g. the Americans for Democratic Action, and the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy) (Lebow, Reference Lebow2010). The UK-based Carr gained theoretical inspiration from leftist social theorists like Karl Mannheim, who – though originally Hungarian – had taught at Frankfurt alongside Tillich and Sinzheimer before fleeing Nazism. Like too many others on the western left, he was at least briefly mesmerized by Soviet communism; the writings of this onetime ‘Establishment’ figure show indelible evidence of a far-reaching radicalization especially during the late 1930s and 1940s (Carr, Reference Carr2003 [1953]; Haslam, 1999: 54; Jones, Reference Jones1998, 121–143). To be sure, Carr supported the appeasement of Nazi Germany in the late 1930s, but this was a position – though often forgotten today – supported by many leftists and especially pacifists who hoped to avoid another horrific world war. Schuman was a first-generation German–American and, like Niebuhr, in the 1930s a left-winger and anti-fascist who traveled widely in Europe and was shocked by the Nazi takeover of a country for which he may have maintained some sense of filial attachment (1936a).

Although typically relegated in the recent scholarly literature to the category of obscure mid-century US Realists (Haslam, Reference Haslam2002: 197–198; Lebow, Reference Lebow2003: 14), Schuman in the Reference Schuman1930s and ‘1940s was in fact a prominent public commentator on international affairs, a prolific writer (and professor at prestigious Williams College) who wrote regularly for left and left-liberal journals; a leading US intellectual historian of the 1930s and 1940s has aptly described him as ‘the [then left-wing] New Republic’s resident specialist in Realpolitik’ (Pells, Reference Pells1973: 64, 77, 301–302, 308, 322; also, Pells, Reference Pells1985: 38). Alongside a widely used college textbook on international politics,Footnote 7 between 1929 and 1941 he managed to write an astonishing seven books dealing with US policy toward the Soviet Union, French and German foreign policy, the Weimar Republic, and the rise of fascism, a number of which appeared with major commercial presses and were quickly reprinted (Reference Schuman1928, Reference Schuman1931, Reference Schuman1933, Reference Schuman1935, Reference Schuman1937a, Reference Schuman1939, Reference Schuman1941a, Reference Schuman1941c). His intellectual trajectory in some ways paralleled that of the already more famous theologian Niebuhr: both were workaholic German–Americans with modest social backgrounds from the Midwest; both could be identified with what was already gaining attention as a loosely defined ‘realistic’ approach to the study of global affairs; both were left-wingers, with Niebuhr having played an active role in the Socialist Party in the 1930s, and Schuman a self-described ‘Liberal’ who nonetheless favored socialist economic reforms, and whose at times positive portrayal of the Soviet model had already garnered him some notoriety among independent leftists less forgiving of the terrible crimes of Stalinism.Footnote 8 Neither was an orthodox Marxist, though both made creative use of Marxism in developing a radical critique of liberal capitalism, whose impending doom Niebuhr had predicted in the aptly entitled Reflections on the End of An Era (Reference Niebuhr1934), and which Schuman marshaled to impressive uses in a study of fascism, which he described in Marxist terms as the ‘social philosophy and the State-form of the bourgeoisie in the monopolistic epoch of late capitalism’ (Reference Schuman1935: 480).

Both early on advocated forceful US action against Nazism, vociferously criticizing the failure of the western liberal democracies to aid the anti-fascist cause. Both writers also sought a synthesis of the liberal and libertarian spirit of Anglo-American political traditions with a collectivist socialism. Key differences also separated them, one of which helps explain Niebuhr’s public acclaim and Schuman’s relative obscurity during the Cold War. Although both intellectuals were prescient – or what US right-wingers later decried as ‘premature’ – anti-fascists, Schuman’s antipathy to Nazism led him early in the game to call for a common front between the western democracies and Soviet Union. Of course, given the alliances that later emerged in World War II, his position was arguably prophetic. Yet Schuman’s ‘realistic’ assessment of the need for far-reaching cooperation with the Soviets tended to go hand-in-hand with a naïve and even apologetic view of the harsh realities of Soviet communism, an error which Niebuhr circumvented even during his most radical moments (Reference Schuman1930, Reference Schuman1936b, Reference Schuman1937b). While Niebuhr later was able to make a name for himself as one of America’s leading anti-communist left-liberals, a former radical who had seen the errors of his ways and had never been tainted by totalitarianism, Schuman instead faced the hostile pillorying of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which he successfully escaped but only at the cost of a tarnished reputation.Footnote 9 Although he was able to continue teaching at Williams College until 1968, Schuman would always remain something of a black sheep among postwar Realists.

Yet it was to this political and disciplinary outsider to which mid-century Realism owes some of its most important insights about global reform.

World state or world community?

Readers of the left-wing political journal The Nation during January 1942 were probably surprised to find its pages devoted to a spirited debate about the proper contours of a prospective postwar reconstruction of the global order by Reinhold Niebuhr and Frederick L. Schuman, two up-coming international political thinkers. The Japanese, after all, had just bombed Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, and thus the United States had only been formally at war for little more than a month when Niebuhr published a stinging review of Schuman’s Design for Power: The Struggle for the World in the 10 January issue, with Schuman heatedly responding in an illuminating exchange that took place in the ‘Letters to the Editors’ section on 24 January (Schuman, Reference Schuman1941a; Niebuhr, Reference Niebuhr1942a; Niebuhr and Schuman, Reference Niebuhr and Schuman1942). Despite the early stage of open US involvement, both Schuman and Niebuhr already seemed remarkably self-assured in their assessments of what the war required. Far-reaching global political reform, both agreed, would have to come out of it, and the only real question concerned the best way to achieve it.

Schuman had concluded his 1941 study of the origins of the wartime crisis with a stirring defense of world government: the atrocious horrors of contemporary warfare demonstrated unequivocally the necessity of a novel global order able finally to free humankind from the scourge of international anarchy. The aim of US involvement in the war effort could hardly be the reestablishment of an anarchical state that had plunged humanity into the terrors of a second disastrous worldwide conflagration, but instead the construction of a global federal state. Given the ongoing world war and the political divisions that would outlive the war, the time for full-scale world government was not yet propitious. In the meantime, however, ‘[l]et America and the British Commonwealth at once proclaim a customs union now and invite all Latin Americans to join. Let America and the British democracies adopt a common currency and a common citizenship…and establish a provisional federal government with limited, but adequate powers to provide for the common defense and general welfare’ (1941a: 307).Footnote 10 In this way, the United States and its allies could provide a positive example of a functioning supranational federal state, to which they might soon invite others to join. They thereby might also offer an attractive institutional alternative to the emerging European ‘new order’ dominated by ‘Fascist Caesars’ as well as its Japanese-dominated corollary in Asia. The central issue at hand was not whether the globe would undergo a process of far-reaching political unification, but ‘who will build that unity, on what foundations and for what purposes’ (1941a: 305).

Modern capitalism and technology had generated an intermeshed economic and social universe, or the foundations of what Schuman dubbed ‘World Society’ or, alternately, the global ‘Great Neighborhood’. Yet the economic and technological facts of world society conflicted with an anachronistic state system requiring of nation states that they compete ruthlessly for power and resources. As long as peoples had lived ‘simply and poorly on their local lands with little business across frontiers’, power politics had remained a relatively ‘harmless sport of kings, politicians, and patriots’. In the context of an interdependent world society, however, it had become a ‘formula for universal ruin’ (1941a: 300). Humankind could no longer benefit from the social and economic advances of world society: the existing state system posed an existential threat to the valuable achievements of modern social life, which – if properly reformed along left-wing lines – could be harnessed to serve humane purposes. Pace those who might scoff at his call for an Atlantic federation to be followed by world government, Schuman recalled the example of the US founding, when members of then-disparate British colonies successfully founded a new federal union despite their many disagreements.

Niebuhr’s critical response is revealing for two reasons. First, Niebuhr embraced Schuman’s call for a novel global polity as the best answer to the pathologies of modern total war. Whatever the faults of his analysis, Schuman had at least identified a desirable long-term goal. Second, Niebuhr’s criticisms anticipated the central contours of his main anxieties about increasingly popular models of global reform as they were widely advanced by global federalists and ‘one-worlders’ during the 1940s and early 1950s (Wooley, Reference Wooley1988; Wittner, Reference Wittner1993).

Niebuhr praised Schuman for recognizing that novel ‘political instruments of world organization, compatible with the necessities of economic interdependence on a world scale’, alone could secure world peace (Niebuhr, Reference Niebuhr1942a: 43). Although identifying his own thinking closely with that of so-called ‘historical realists’ in a closely related 1942 essay, he admonished them for failing to grapple with the novelties of the historical situation and thus not acknowledging the need for new global institutions (Reference Niebuhr1967a [1942]: 208). At least in this respect, Schuman’s standpoint was superior to that of competing Realists. Another Reference Schuman1943 essay observed that the balance of power was unable to secure peace; international anarchy was unacceptable, and only a novel global organization could circumvent future world wars (Reference Niebuhr1967c [1943]: 203). However, Niebuhr simultaneously accused Schuman of leaving ‘the important question unanswered’, namely how a prospective global government ‘will not degenerate into tyrannical power’. ‘[E]every?; major and minor prophet in the land is talking world federation now’, Niebuhr added. Unfortunately, Schuman had failed to ‘give us precise specifications on how this stupendous task of world organization is to be achieved’, despite its normative desirability (1942a: 44). As Niebuhr observed in another Nation exchange with Schuman in Reference Schuman1946, the author’s writings suffered from ‘the bewildering habit of ascending to the most rarefied heights of constitutional idealism and then descending to the depths of Realpolitik without giving the poor reader a chance to adjust himself to the different levels’ (Niebuhr and Schuman, Reference Niebuhr and Schuman1946: 383; also, Niebuhr, Reference Niebuhr1946). How a global constitutional order could concretely emerge out of the harsh facts of Realpolitik described elsewhere so vividly by Schuman remained unexplained. Like too many other global constitutional reformers, Niebuhr declared, Schuman had succumbed to a crude rationalism: the fact that humanity ought to establish a new global order hardly demonstrated its attainability.

Why did Schuman’s proposal open the door to worldwide tyranny? The answer was not because every world state was destined to do so; the problem was rather Schuman’s failure to see that a new global political system could only follow out of a gradual evolutionary process. Despite growing economic and technological interdependence, no worldwide social community presently functioned like those typically found at the national level. Yet political organizations everywhere depended on deeply rooted ‘natural forces of social cohesion’ or shared ‘social tissue’ (Niebuhr and Schuman, Reference Niebuhr and Schuman1942: 103; Reference Niebuhr1967e [1953]: 216). Schuman overstated the integrative capacities of existing world society, which had not yet become a coherent community in which social ties relied on far-reaching relations of mutual trust and respect (Niebuhr, Reference Niebuhr1953 [1948]: 16). An international society able to ‘harmonize vast vitalities, abridge age-old sovereignties, arbitrate between incommensurate interests’ had yet to emerge, and to claim otherwise was simply wrong (1942: 44). Without a vastly more integrated social community than presently found at the global level, no global federal system with meaningful democratic credentials could hope to flourish. Majority rule, for example, made no sense without some far-reaching sense of shared interests and values still absent at the global level (1953 [1948]: 19–20). Successful government could never be created by constitutional fiat; state power played only a circumscribed role in ensuring social integration, which at the national level had been accomplished by common political experiences, culture, language, and a shared sense of ethnicity and nationality. If a global government were set up, it would lack the requisite social and cultural basis and find itself forced to rely on authoritarian devices. Niebuhr refused to exclude a priori the possibility that a prospective global or international society might someday perform indispensable integrative functions in novel and even unprecedented ways. Yet such future prospects did nothing to distract from the present-day fact that economic interdependence coexisted with profound moral, social, and political divisions. And those divides simply rendered the establishment of a truly appealing global system of government presently untenable.

Niebuhr also developed a forceful critique of Schuman’s recourse to the example of the US founding. Schuman was depending on a fictional Enlightenment-era social contract model of politics that misleadingly implied that out of a fictional state of nature individuals or governments could come together and create ‘either government or community out of whole cloth’. No government, Niebuhr insisted, had ever been created in this way. Even the 1787 US constitutional founding presupposed the existence of a prior political and cultural community, which had emerged in the colonial period and then was forged during the American Revolution ‘on the battlefield in a common struggle against a common foe’ (1953 [1948]: 18–19). Successful constitution-making was always predicated on the existence of a developed social community.

Despite the myriad strengths of Niebuhr’s critical response to Schuman, it arguably left him at something of a theoretical dead end. Although endorsing the establishment of some sort of federal global state as an ultimate endpoint, his writings on global reform from the 1940s and 1950s had little to say about how one might move humankind somewhat closer toward achieving it. He repeatedly insisted that the construction of an integrated world community would have to predate any fully developed democratic global polity, but when pressed to explain how even this might be accomplished, his comments were vague. As the Cold War unfolded, Niebuhr instead tended to defend the newly created United Nations against both excessively ‘idealistic’ and ‘cynical realist’ detractors as a sensible institutional compromise: while rightly challenging international anarchy, it also openly acknowledged the harsh realities of global power inequality and sensibly outfitted the great powers with special institutional privileges. It also pointed the way toward a more democratic future global order: it gave weaker states some rudimentary institutional devices in the General Assembly to check the great powers (Reference Niebuhr1953 [1948]: 20–21; also, Reference Niebuhr1967a [1942]; Reference Niebuhr1967d [1945]. At an historical juncture when international society remained underdeveloped, this was apparently the best humankind could expect.

Even if Niebuhr was probably justified in this political judgment, he had little to say about how the United Nations someday might evolve into a more appealing form of democratic global order.Footnote 11 That political and intellectual task, he seemed to think, was best left to future generations.

A Socialist United Europe?

Niebuhr and Schuman were not alone among Realists of 1940s in debating the prospects of postnational postwar order. Across the Atlantic, E.H. Carr was energetically developing a radical vision of a novel supranational political and social system. Carr’s landmark Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–39 (Reference Carr1964 [1939]) had predicted in its final chapter the demise of the nation-state, and the author had followed up on his prophecy with a series of wartime studies sketching out an ambitious model of continental or regionally-based social and economic governance, to be complemented by a global security system in which both great and small nations would pool military resources (Reference Carr1942; Reference Carr1967 [1945]). To those who considered the latter utopian, he pointed to the successful Allied wartime experience of ‘mixing up’ troops from large and small countries (1967 [1945]: 55). In response to those skeptical of the need for cross-border economic planning, Carr proffered a devastating critique of both traditional liberal capitalism and conventional defenses of national self-determination. Although it was ‘natural and imperative for human beings to combine for various purposes’, and this natural proclivity opened the door to legitimate expressions of ‘national thought and feeling’, national and cultural identities could henceforth only be effectively preserved within the confines of interlocking economic and military units transcending the cramped confines of the existing nation-state (1967 [1945]: 59). The nation-state was no longer the best vessel for preserving national or cultural identity. Nor was it sufficiently equipped to tackle the supranational demands of contemporary social and economic affairs. Carr went so far as to argue that military innovations had rendered ‘the whole concept of strategic frontiers…obsolescent’ even for relatively large and powerful states (1967 [1945]: 58). Even the great powers could no longer escape the novel realities of a military universe in which airborne armies and projectiles easily pierced their frontiers: social and especially military ‘interdependence is now universal’ (1967 [1945]: 58).Footnote 12

Carr acknowledged that the great powers would still possess disproportionate influence in any prospective political order ‘beyond the nation state’. Yet this by no means entailed that they would have to mimic the Nazi Herrenvolk of wartime German-ruled Europe. The multinational social and economic units Carr proposed would strive to guarantee equal economic opportunity, eliminate ‘freedom from want’, and guarantee ‘full employment’ in order to generate social and economic equality within as well as between and among national units: only economic redistribution could provide the sufficiently sturdy social foundations required by emerging continental power blocs. Nor was this demand politically simple-minded. For Carr, the demise of the nation-state was already pretty much a fait accompli; the question at hand was what kind of postnational order would replace it, and to which principles and ideals it would subscribe. Radical social reform – international democratic socialism via state planning – could now be realistically pursued because the quest for social justice was universally shared. In contrast to those who thought that a postwar global constitutional order, despite the manifest political divisions plaguing international affairs, might be constructed on shared political ideals, it made vastly more sense to build on the basis of an emerging and virtually universal social consensus – extending from Roosevelt’s New Deal to the Soviet Union – to reduce economic inequality and replace competitive capitalism. As Carr bluntly posited in The Soviet Impact on the Western World (Reference Carr1947), the Soviets represented a revolutionary force in contemporary affairs, and it was to a great extent their achievement to have placed socialist-style economic planning on the agenda everywhere. The task at hand in Western Europe was to meet the Soviet challenge by constructing collectivist ‘forms of social and economic action in which what is valid in individualist and the democratic tradition’ was meaningfully preserved (1947: 113).Footnote 13

Much of Carr’s argument echoed Schuman’s. Both married a brand of socialism aspiring to preserve the lasting achievements of western liberalism with a periodically uncanny admiration for the Soviet model. Both also took the emergence of the Nazi-dominated European Grossraum and its Japanese-dominated Asian corollary as empirical confirmation for the thesis that the nation-state was already being jettisoned for regionalized political blocs better able to master contemporary economic trends. Like many others on the left at the time, both also exhibited a strong – and, in hindsight, somewhat naïve – faith in bureaucratically organized state economic planning. Their intellectual disagreements were equally illuminating. Closer on this matter to Niebuhr, Carr considered world government premature: ‘the sense of the unity of mankind, sufficient to support the common affirmation of certain universal principles and purposes, is not yet strong enough…to sustain an organization exercising sovereign and universal authority’ (Reference Carr1967 [1945]: 44; also, Reference Carr1949). Although crucial security matters should be coordinated at the global level,Footnote 14 it would be counterproductive to try to place many of the key tasks of modern government in the hands of a worldwide political organization. As a long-term goal, world government might be desirable; in the short term it was misleading and potentially irresponsible. Like Schuman, Carr also fused a socialist attack on capitalism with a critique of the traditional Westphalian state system. Yet Schuman never convincingly linked the two lines of argumentation, other than by implying that international anarchy was somehow inconsistent with the fruits of ‘World Society’, whose reconstruction he envisioned along socialist terms. Why world government necessarily followed from his leftist critique of the global political economy remained unclear. In contrast, Carr was more consistent in tying his defense of new continentally based social and economic units to his overall social and economic diagnosis: ongoing economic transformations gravitated ‘toward several competing centers of power; and the very complexity of modern life makes for division’ (1967 [1945]: 45).

Carr’s paramount contribution to the Realist debate on global reform probably lies elsewhere, however. As noted, Niebuhr had powerfully countered Schuman’s version of Realist ‘one-worldism’, but only at the cost of stumbling onto a programmatic dead-end: global government – and probably a global federal state – remained an attractive ultimate goal. Yet it remained unclear what its defenders could actually do to bring it about, other than somehow vaguely contribute to a ‘world community’. But how was such a community to be built?

To his credit, Carr offered a tentative answer to this question. And that answer at least indirectly shaped a great deal of 1940s and 1950s Realist debate about global reform.

Most obviously, Carr’s analysis inferred that regional and continental political units preoccupied with social and economic undertakings were the most practical place to begin creating the ‘social tissue’ Niebuhr had described. Yet Carr did more than suggest the relative advantages of regionalist models of postnational organization. In a fascinating section of Nationalism and After, he endorsed key features of David Mitrany’s ‘functionalist’ theory of international organization.Footnote 15 Though he oddly neglected to mention the name of its chief theoretical architect, Carr praised the trend toward establishing international organizations oriented toward down-to-earth regulatory tasks; here was a practical method by means of which nation-states might pool their resources to combat a growing array of supranational social and economic challenges. Best of all, this was no pie-in-the-sky utopian dream: ‘a vast number of new functional organizations have been created’, and given the exigencies of postwar social and economic existence, they would continue to proliferate (1967 [1945]: 48). The functionalists were right, Carr noted, to highlight the simple insight that international organizations set up for concrete purposes – he mentioned the European railway union and international commission regulating the Danube – would take institutional manifestations no less diverse than the myriad regulatory tasks they were supposed to handle. Yet the resulting ‘multiplicity of authorities and diversity of loyalties’ might perform a favorable role in counteracting ominous trends toward excessive political centralization and perhaps even ‘unmitigated totalitarianism’ (1967 [1945]: 49). Functionalism offered a fruitful approach by means of which a unified socialist Europe could pursue far-reaching social and economic regulation without succumbing to Soviet-style dictatorship. One flaw with models of global federalism was their fidelity, as Mitrany similarly underscored, to the rigid institutional illusion of ‘one size fits all’. The messy institutional complexity of emerging functional organizations alarmed global federalists who preferred neat constitutional schemes. Instead they should have celebrated the appearance of a rich multiplicity of international organizations, set up to pursue specific technical and economic tasks, as a viable instrument for preserving pluralism and liberty:

Functional organization not only contributed to the creation of a postnational society which alone might successfully undergird stable political organization beyond the nation-state; it also checked potentially dangerous centralizing tendencies, which for Carr included the pathological side-effects of a globe likely to be carved up into competing regional power blocs. A planet divided into rival multinational blocs might simply serve as a breeding ground for ‘a new imperialism that would be simply the old nationalism writ large and would almost certainly pave the way for more titanic and more devastating wars’ (1967 [1945]: 53). As some functional organizations transcended the boundaries of emerging regional blocs, they potentially contributed to the creation of ‘social tissue’ between and among them, and thus might help mix the cement for the foundations of an eventual world union.

Functionalism and the future of the ‘civilized world’

Even Carr’s most sophisticated commentators have missed the importance functionalism at least briefly played in his reflections on global reform (Jones, Reference Jones1998; Cox, Reference Cox2000). Fortunately for postwar Realism, Hans Morgenthau probably did not.

Morgenthau’s scathing 1948 World Politics review article on Carr’s writings exhibited all the intellectual traits that paved the way for his rapid professional ascent in the late 1940s and 1950s. Although describing Carr as a ‘lucid and brilliant’ thinker, grouping him just behind Niebuhr among contemporary intellectuals for recognizing ‘the essential defects of Western political thought,’ Morgenthau (Reference Morgenthau1948a: 128, 133–134) provided an incisive and in some ways devastating attack, accusing Carr of succumbing to ‘a relativistic, instrumentalist logic of morality.’ It was this moral relativism, Morgenthau argued, that unwittingly transformed Carr into the sad ‘utopian of power’ who had offered a terrible apology for Chamberlain’s appeasement policies, condoned the swallowing up of Europe’s small states by their big neighbors, and now exhibited an excessive admiration for Soviet collectivism.

Morgenthau’s jeremiad has been widely debated in the literature (Dunne, Reference Dunne2000). Yet existing discussions miss something important: Morgenthau’s postwar model of global reform mirrored key features of Carr’s reform ideas as formulated especially in Nationalism and After, one of the books discussed in Morgenthau’s review. An obvious idiosyncrasy of Morgenthau’s review was his failure to identify precisely what made Carr such a brilliant thinker; its tone was overwhelmingly critical. In any event, Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace formulated a vision of global reform strikingly reminiscent of Carr’s (Reference Morgenthau1948b [1954]).

Politics Among Nations famously declared that a ‘world state is unattainable in our world, yet indispensable for survival’ in light of the horrors of modern warfare (1948b: 419). For Morgenthau, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki had simply corroborated the suspicion that eventually only a world state could secure human survival. Yet in agreement with Carr and Niebuhr, Morgenthau also argued vociferously against the claim that a world state could be realized anytime in the foreseeable future. For reasons closely paralleling Niebuhr’s, Morgenthau posited that contemporary attempts to establish a global federal order were doomed. Such proposals rested on an undialectical Hobbesianism according to which the state alone can ‘maintain domestic peace….That the state is essential, but not sufficient to keep the peace of national societies is demonstrated by the historical experience of civil wars’ (1948b: 397). Yet any viable global political authority presupposed a highly developed ‘supranational society’ or world community capable of accomplishing extensive integrative tasks presently performed more-or-less spontaneously by flourishing nationally based communities (1954: 479). Stable political systems built on a widely shared sense of fairness and basic justice, which encouraged participants to follow the rules of the game even when specific outcomes seemed unattractive. Recourse to coercive state power could be minimized because what Niebuhr similarly described as ‘organic forces of cohesion’ functioned in subtle and oftentimes easily overlooked ways (Niebuhr, Reference Niebuhr1953: 25). Social cleavages and loyalties would have to be crosscutting, impressing on political agents the basic ‘relativity of their interests and loyalties’. This ‘plural role of friend and opponent’ reduced the explosiveness of group conflict: a rival in one social arena might be an ally or friend in another (1954: 471). For this reason as well, successful political communities were only required to unleash coercive force in rare circumstances. At the domestic level, a rich variety of social and political mores, norms, and social practices typically brought about peaceful transformations of public opinion. Of course, formal state institutions then sometimes operated to transform public opinion into legally binding political and social change. Yet formal government institutions always remained circumscribed ‘agents of society as a whole’ (1954: 414).

As any world state established at the present would necessarily lack satisfactory social foundations, it could only take the form of ‘a totalitarian monster resting on feet of clay’, requiring ‘complete discipline and loyalty among…millions of soldiers and policemen needed to enforce its rule over an unwilling humanity’ (1954: 482). In contradistinction to Niebuhr, however, and in analytic alliance with Carr, Morgenthau insisted that political actors could nonetheless take concrete steps to begin creating ‘supranational society’. The world state constituted more than a vague long-term goal about which one might fantasize longingly, but only act to realize ineffectively. While Carr had briefly discussed functionalism, Morgenthau gave Mitrany’s toolkit a major role in his alternative story of how humankind might establish the social preconditions of world statehood: Morgenthau was even more enthused by functionalism than Carr. As he wrote in his ‘Introduction’ to the Reference Morgenthau1966 US reissue of Mitrany’s Working Peace System, ‘the future of the civilized world is intimately tied to the future of the functional approach to international organization’ (1966: 11). In a key section of Politics Among Nations, he endorsed Mitrany’s functionalist model of international reform and applied its tenets to the problems of European integration, which Morgenthau described with ever-heightened enthusiasm in many subsequent editions (1954: 492–493). Like Carr, Morgenthau saw functionalism as a path breaking strategy for advancing the cause of social integration at the regional level. Yet he also envisioned it as a road beyond regionalism, whose dangers he was no less cognizant of than Carr. If nation-states worked together in pursuing concrete (mostly economic and technical) tasks, constructing along the way creative but eminently practical supranational institutions, the building blocks of global order could be laid. By ‘linking authority to a specific activity’ or function, new international organizations could cut ‘the traditional link between authority and a definite territory’ (Mitrany, Reference Mitrany1946: 6). Such cooperation would generate new supranational forms of social practice, shared norms, and complexes of shared interests; the preconditions for global governance might be prepared. For Morgenthau, as for Carr, the central task facing global reformers was not the transfer of national sovereignty by means of constitutional formulas, but instead piecemeal reform, which gradually transferred the true seat of sovereign power.

Morgenthau’s main innovation vis-a-vis Carr is easily overlooked but nonetheless noteworthy. As noted, Carr had tied his embrace of functionalism to a collectivist vision in which functional organizations operated alongside traditional socialist-style state economic planning in building the foundations of postnational order. Always more moderate politically, and never as attracted to conventional statist models of socialism, Morgenthau broke the link between functionalism and state planning. As he had suggested in a revealing Reference Morgenthau1944 essay, grandiose visions of (socialist) planning rested on an overly rationalistic vision of social life, which underplayed its sheer unpredictability. In contrast to free marketers who consequently tossed any role for rational social or economic planning out the window, Morgenthau opted to defend a circumscribed role for planning: social planning could work only if recognized that it could guarantee ‘not the one correct solution for all the problems of social life, but a series of alternative and hypothetical patterns, one of which will supply the rational foundation for an approximate solution of a specific social problem’ (1944: 184–185). Social planning – including economic planning – could play a useful role in social affairs only if one recognized its limitations.

Morgenthau’s great fame, and Carr’s relative neglect during the Cold War in the United States, can surely be attributed at least in part to this difference. Morgenthau’s modest conception of planning meshed relatively well with the New Deal and postwar US liberal visions of a ‘mixed economy’, whereas Carr’s was more closely linked to traditional socialist ideals.Footnote 16 Whatever Morgenthau’s argument consequently gained in political appeal, however, it lost in social radicalism. Unlike Carr, Morgenthau in the postwar years consistently placed questions of cross-border economic distribution on the political back burner. Supranational society, it seemed, would somehow have to be built without economic redistribution between and among nation-states.

Backlash against functionalism

John Herz, another left-wing Jewish refugee from Nazism who never gained Morgenthau’s prominence, but whose work has recently attracted overdue attention, similarly married functionalism to Realism in his International Politics in the Atomic Age (1959; Booth, Reference Booth2008; Puglierin, Reference Puglierin2008; Wheeler, Reference Wheeler2008). Any doubts about the decadent character of the modern nation-state and traditional state system, Herz argued, should finally have been put to rest by the H-Bomb, which decisively impaired the performance of minimal protective functions even by powerful states.Footnote 17 Recent military innovations, in short, were obliterating the longstanding link between territoriality and political organization. Though sensibly noting that any discussion of ‘the details of a more integrated world structure, such as problems of representation and voting procedures’ remained premature, Herz joined other mid-century Realists in supporting the eventual establishment of a global polity (Reference Herz1959: 302). He also conceded that functionalism could ‘contribute a good deal to the solution of problems in a truly universalist fashion, since today, the technical prerequisites for success exist, frequently for the first time in history’ (1959: 329). When properly employed, functional organization might aid in the direction of moving toward the ‘universalist’ social orientation that, in Herz’s theoretical framework, played an analytic role akin to what Niebuhr and others had called ‘world society’. Cross-border cooperation on technical and economic projects might over time affect even those activities associated with classical power politics ‘through a modification of attitudes resulting in an abatement of nationalist exclusions’ (1959: 342).Footnote 18 Cooperative attitudes and practices that emerged in relatively down-to-earth and seemingly apolitical spheres of activity could ‘spill over’ and help mitigate otherwise conflict-laden facets of interstate affairs.

However, Herz worried that functionalists made things too easy for themselves. They overstated what their approach could accomplish, naively believing that it was a cure-all for every imaginable political conflict; at least implicitly, the criticism was also directed at Morgenthau, who had disproportionately highlighted functionalist virtues but not its vices.Footnote 19 ‘It would be quite unrealistic…to believe that the future of the world is safe because of the existence of – relatively speaking – a mere handful of men and women in New York, Geneva, and other places scattered around the world, whose services are devoted to problems of world food supplies, health standards in underdeveloped areas, and similar tasks’ (1959: 326). Functional organization had already generated a class of international civil servants, and even if their many noteworthy accomplishments might recall the Hegelian vision of a universally minded state bureaucracy, they too often exhibited evidence of particularism and narrow-mindedness. Cynics might plausibly ‘define functionalism as a theory that defends the power positions of international bureaucracies’ 1959: 327).Footnote 20 Even though Herz quickly distanced himself from this cynical view, he fretted that functionalism provided too little too late in a world facing the specter of nuclear holocaust. Functionalism could only aid in the construction of global political order when ‘based on a broader foundation of public support and public attitude’ (1959: 330). Yet this would necessarily ‘depend on the emergence of a universalist ‘groundswell,’ from which the feeling for the necessity to act in a common world interest would impose itself with compelling force upon people and people’s minds’ (1959: 331). Functionalism might help create the building blocks of a new world order, but only a new ‘universalist’ awareness – and political action based on it – could put the blocks together in the right way. However, the prospects that humankind’s slowly emerging sense of ‘universal concern’ might effectively buttress political reform remained remote (1959: 338–357).

A complementary albeit somewhat more boisterous note of caution about functionalism was found in Schuman’s most impressive postwar book, his massive Commonwealth of Man: An Inquiry into Power Politics and World Government (Reference Schuman1952). The volume was obviously intended in part as a retort to Niebuhr’s initial criticisms of Schuman’s early Realist ‘one-worldism.’ Along the way, however, it also countered those who downplayed functionalism’s limitations as a path to global statehood. Absent the communist fellow-traveling that had plagued his earlier thinking,Footnote 21 Schuman acceded to Niebuhr’s original criticism that democratic world government was hardly on the immediate political horizon; the Cold War indeed rendered its imminent establishment impossible. Yet he railed against Niebuhr’s view that a world community based on ‘organic cohesion’ necessarily preceded the creation of constitutional and institutional reform: historical experience suggested that ‘organic cohesion and unity were the slow consequence and gradual result of common [political] agreement’ (1952: 471). State building and constitutional craftsmanship were far more than the passive offspring of gradual social evolution conceived of in a quasi-Burkean manner; instead, they could play a decisive role in actively bringing about social integration. The relationship between world government and world community was an interactive one, in which each might productively contribute to the other’s success. A forceful popular movement – Schuman wrote in part as a partisan ‘one-worlder’ – could help engender the necessary measure of social integration (1952: 472–473). Schuman also accused Niebuhr of overstating the requisite moral and cultural homogeneity of any future global state. To be sure, a global federal state would have to rest on some modicum of basic social consensus. Yet by the mid- twentieth century ‘all of contemporary mankind… shares a greater store of common purposes, practices, and aspirations than ever before in the experience of the species’ (1952: 472).

If Realists were serious about the world state, they would have to join arms with ‘idealistic’ proponents of global institutional change. The Realists’ proper role in the movement would presumably be to temper the naivete of its unschooled enthusiasts. Nevertheless, the struggle for a global democratic federal order still deserved their political sympathy. A lengthy section devoted to functionalism noted that ‘as a highway toward unity and peace’ it was ‘a road well traveled and well worth traveling’, but not because a ‘blessed destination lies at journey’s ends’ (1952: 336). Schuman’s ‘blessed destination’ of global democracy would ultimately need political craftsmanship and mass politics to bring it about. The results of existing functionalist organization remained decidedly mixed. On a planet plagued by massive inequalities even seemingly uncontroversial cross-border technical and economic matters could prove politically contentious. Even though the Schuman Plan and other functionalist-style experiments at European integration offered hopeful signs, ‘only future decisions’ could reveal what would come of them (1952: 326–327). The best evidence for the limitations of functionalism in politically charged matters was the tragic fate of the postwar Lilienthal–Acheson proposal to place the regulation of atomic power in supranational hands, which – as Schuman accurately noted – had been modeled partly along functionalist lines.Footnote 22 ‘Common interest in avoiding the suicide of the human race, it might have been supposed, would have been sufficient to foster global agreement to take the whole issue out of the arena of power politics and make it a problem of administration’ (1952: 341). Yet power politics there had destructively blocked sensible reform, as it would elsewhere, unless the fundamental rules of the state system were reshuffled. To do so, Schuman reiterated, required political will. While Niebuhr had guffawed at the youthful Schuman’s appeal to the US constitutional convention, the mature Schuman stuck to his guns: the global federalist vision indeed rested on the belief, shared by the US founders, that legitimate government alone derives from ‘an act of will and discussion and compromise and solemn compacts one with another’ (1952: 477). When push came to shove, Niebuhr was nothing more than a modern-day global Anti-Federalist, while only Schuman and his ‘one-world’ friends remained true to the noble Federalist legacy of the US founding (1952: 468).

The maturation and subsequent demise of realist global reformism

In a 1964 essay originally appearing in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Morgenthau effectively endorsed the criticisms made by Herz and Schuman. In a piece aptly entitled ‘The Future of Europe,’ he again praised functionalism for helping to supply ‘the indispensable material foundations for the political unification of Europe,’ which he forthrightly endorsed as a desirable goal. But he now qualified his predictable enthusiasm for functionalism. Functionalists in Europe had successfully

Furthermore, functionalists were wrong to suggest that ‘the political unification of Europe will somehow take care of itself,’ and that a ‘qualitative change’ in European politics might simply result from ‘the quantitative accumulation of functional European communities’. If Europeans were in fact to exploit the fruits of supranational functional organization, the ‘jump from national to European sovereignty must be made by an act of will’, an express political decision that alone would make it possible to coordinate the divergent interests generated by functionalism and keep ‘recalcitrant members in check’ (Reference Morgenthau1970 [1964]: 335).

In short, Morgenthau conceded that functionalism was necessary, but insufficient to the development of effective supranational polities. Functionalism could only flourish within the confines of common political and legal institutions it helped in decisive ways to generate, but whose creation ultimately transcended its developmental logic. During this juncture in his intellectual trajectory, not surprisingly, Morgenthau became noticeably more sympathetic toward precisely those calls for global government which he had previously attacked as ‘idealistic’. At least this ‘classical’ Realist had become something of a sober and hard-headed ‘one-worlder’ (Scheuerman, Reference Scheuerman2009: 135–164).

Nonetheless, the classical Realist debate on global reform pretty much came to an end in the mid-1960s,Footnote 23 as its representatives turned their political energies to the Vietnam War, which they typically opposed. However, the outlines of an identifiably Realist defense of postnational political order were by then clear enough. First, classical Realists sympathized strongly with demands for new political units ‘beyond the nation state’ at the regional and ultimately global levels. No single factor motored their reformist impulses: what we now describe as ‘economic globalization’, growing social interdependence as resulting from technological change, as well as the rise of modern industrialized (and total) warfare, and of course the nuclear revolution, all encouraged them to insist on the nation state’s increasingly anachronistic character.Footnote 24 Scholarly accounts which emphasize only one of these factors, for example, nuclear weaponry,distort a messier (and more interesting) story (Craig, Reference Craig2003). Second, the classical Realists oftentimes envisioned Mitrany’s functionalist model of international organization as a practical strategy for developing a mature world community. Even Schuman, after all, conceded that functionalism might strengthen the ‘Great Neighborhood’ about whose maturity he was always more hopeful than his more skeptical Realist allies. Moreover, such a world community would have to be able to perform far-reaching integrative functions. Otherwise, its political structure would inevitably take on authoritarian features. Third, the Realists recognized that only express political action could eventually create continental or regional governments and then – someday – a world state. They differed, of course, in their individual assessments about when postnational states might best be established, as well about how this political will might best manifest itself, with (the Enlightenment rationalist) Schuman tending to show the greatest optimism, and (the more Burkean) Niebuhr always remaining relatively skeptical. However, they rejected the view that cross-border economic and technical cooperation willy-nilly would produce a new global order.

In hindsight, perhaps the most striking feature of the story I have tried to recount here is its relative unfamiliarity. Contemporary Realists, at the very least, seem uninterested in this reformist facet of ‘their’ intellectual legacy, despite the homage regularly paid to Carr, Morgenthau, Niebuhr and others. Why then did serious and constructive discussions about global reform pretty much vanish from Realist intellectual discourse especially in US political science?

The answer is a complicated one. The rise of Henry Kissinger, whose early work idiosyncratically endorsed Kant’s moral theory while aggressively discounting his political dream of a pacific federation of republics, and who quickly formulated a deeply nostalgic brand of Realism which pined away for a ‘golden age’ of classical diplomacy (e.g. Metternich, Castlereagh, and Bismarck), played some role (Kissinger, Reference Kissinger1957; Dickson, Reference Dickson1978). Even greater responsibility for this development can probably be attributed to the influence of Kenneth Waltz, who exploded into the ranks of Realist theory in the late 1950s and 1960s, and who subsequently played a huge role in reorienting it away from some of the preoccupations of classical Realism (Craig, Reference Craig2003: 117–173). Like Niebuhr and Schuman, Waltz came from a socially modest German–American family from the Midwest (Halliday and Rosenberg, Reference Halliday and Rosenberg1989). One of his teachers at Columbia University, whom he thanked in the preface to Man, the State, and War, was Franz L. Neumann, the refugee German-Jewish Marxist who knew Morgenthau from their Weimar days, when both had practiced labor law in the same office run by Hugo Sinzheimer (1959: iii). So the young Waltz might have been expected to build on the reformist and politically radical impulses of mid-century Realism. Instead, he rejected them.

A number of factors were decisive in leading Waltz to accept ‘the existence of an anarchical international structure as a fact of political life’ (Craig, Reference Craig2003: 129). Most obviously, he argued for a strict positivist delineation of scientific from normative inquiry. This move – which has been widely criticized (Ashley, Reference Ashley1981) – helped drive anxieties about the pathologies of the existing state system out of the proper confines of Realist inquiry.Footnote 25 Waltz was also always more sanguine than his Realist predecessors about the political and institutional implications of the nuclear revolution. While especially Morgenthau and Herz believed that nuclear weapons constituted a radical novelty in human affairs that pointed the way toward the establishment of a new global order, Waltz instead has repeatedly emphasized the stabilizing role of nuclear weapons in interstate affairs.Footnote 26

Just as important is the revealing critical argument made – in my view, unconvincingly – about global reform in Waltz’s first book, Man, the State, and War, and which he has repeated at subsequent junctures. Waltz curtly declared in the volume’s final paragraph that the idea of world government as the best remedy for world war ‘may be unassailable in logic’, yet it remained ‘unattainable in practice’ (1959: 238). Given the manifest political and social heterogeneity of global affairs, the ‘amount of force needed to hold’ such a society together by a prospective world state would necessarily have to be massive. Unprecedented and indeed frightening power resources would be required to set up and then maintain it: ‘were world government attempted, we might find ourselves dying in the attempt to unite, or uniting and living a life worse than death’ (Waltz, Reference Waltz1959: 228). In Theory of International Politics, Waltz similarly asserted that in ‘a society of states with little coherence, attempts at world government would founder on the inability of an emerging central authority to mobilize the resources needed to create and maintain the unity of the system by regulating and managing its parts’ (1979: 111–112). Any world state would demand an awe-inspiring concentration of power resources. It would inevitably provide an open invitation to global civil war: its component political elements would have a strong incentive to wrest control of it from rivals. Interstate warfare would merely have been jettisoned for horrible global civil wars pitting agonistic elements of an ostensibly united, but in fact divided, world against each other (111–112).

Waltz’s criticisms obviously echoed Morgenthau’s (and Niebuhr’s) anxieties about a worldwide ‘totalitarian monster resting on feet of clay’. Classical Realists had also worried that premature attempts to establish a novel global order absent a developed world community or ‘supranational society’ would culminate in a monstrous statist beast; they had repeatedly rejected attempts to bring it about by military means for many of the same reasons that alarmed Waltz. Yet just as revealing are the gaps and silences of Waltz’s remarks. As I have tried to show, his predecessors formulated impressive ideas about how a supranational society gradually might be created. Their preoccupation with Mitrany’s reform model derived primarily from the hopeful expectation that functionalism could usefully contribute to the creation of a world community able to perform far-reaching integrative activities. In a prospective socially integrated global order, whose construction obviously represented a long-term project, there would be no reason to assume that a world state would inexorably become a ‘totalitarian monster’. None of the classical Realists naively asserted that a future global order would be free of intense political or social conflict. Yet they thought that intelligent reform measures could gradually pave the way for a world society in which the resolution of conflict was pretty much tamed to the extent that it need not typically take violent forms.

Yet Waltz simply ignored this facet of classical Realist discourse. In contrast to his Realist predecessors, he presupposed as an unalterable fact of political life that international society must always remain deeply divided and thus potentially violent. At the very least, his critical comments on world statehood failed to provide a satisfactory response to the rich and nuanced reformist arguments made by classical Realists about how and why the harshest facts of contemporary international affairs might be gradually but systematically modified.

In any event, it would be wrong to interpret the dramatic shift from mid-century ‘Realist reformism’ to the anti-reformist position of Kissinger or Waltz as constituting little more than an ideological ‘superstructural’ transformation that mechanically followed from purportedly more basic geopolitical structural changes.Footnote 27 First, this interpretation downplays the constitutive role of ideas and norms in (international) social reality. Second, even if some classical Realist defenses of European unification, for example, were in part stimulated by geopolitical anxieties about Soviet communism, such considerations typically took a backseat in the theories discussed here. Carr, for example, saw a unified Europe as a way forward first and foremost to achieve social democratic and potentially socialist economic policies; like the sometimes-fellow traveler Schuman, if anything he may have been insufficiently cognizant of the political threats posed by the Soviet Union. Third, classical Realists thought long and hard about the possibility of world government not as part of some geopolitical strategy by which the United States might outmaneuver its rivals, but instead because they believed – in contrast to Kissinger, Waltz, and many contemporary Realists – that the existing state system was economically, socially, and technologically increasingly obsolescent, and that especially on a planet facing the unprecedented possibility of nuclear warfare, the international status quo represented a recipe for cataclysm. In short, deeply held moral views – and by no means mere power calculations – prompted their demands for far-reaching global reform.

Realist global reformism’s contemporary relevance

Why should we care? What contemporary theoretical contribution might this attempt to revisit the political and intellectual universe of mid-century Realism make?

First, our story raises serious questions about the familiar categories of ‘Realism’ and ‘classical’ Realism. Most obviously, we need to rethink the widely held view that Realism is fundamentally anti-reformist; this is simply inaccurate in the case of some intellectuals widely considered to have been prominent ‘classical’ Realists. More ambitiously, one might reconsider the utility of the term ‘Realism’ altogether: if even those thinkers universally interpreted as paradigmatic embodiments of ‘classical’ Realism instead turn out to have amalgated a complex mix of functionalist and (sometimes) socialist ideas, and even notions of supranational society which at times seem strikingly reminiscent of the English School (Little, Reference Little2003), the category of ‘Realism’ hardly seems to take us very far in getting a handle on their ideas. Revealingly, at least some classical Realists were cautious about embracing the term, and it was probably only fully codified – in a way now recognizable to most scholars of international politics – in the 1950s (Scheuerman, Reference Scheuerman2009). Morgenthau was oftentimes uncomfortable with it; Niebuhr (as noted above) distanced himself from the so-called ‘historical Realists’; for Carr and Schuman the term entailed first and foremost a critical analysis of power relations (on the international scene) inspired by socialist theorists like Marx and Mannheim. Although we still await an adequate conceptual history of international ‘Realism’, the term too often has masked important theoretical distinctions. To the extent that ‘Realism’ quickly became associated with an anti-reformist global agenda, it clearly has gotten in the way of a serious engagement with ‘Realist’ reform ideas.

To be sure, one might still associate ‘Realism’ with particular ideas or concepts, – for example, Herz’s ‘security dilemma’, or certain claims about the balance of power – rather than with specific intellectuals whose thinking perhaps inevitably instantiates divergent strands. Yet even an attempt to salvage the term ‘Realism’ in this fashion cannot fortify the dominant view that mid-century Realists were basically anti-reformist. If we follow some important recent scholarship, even paradigmatic ‘Realist’ theoretical preoccupations ultimately prove institutionally more open-ended than one might at first expect. Morgenthau’s seemingly nostalgic account of the balance of power, for example, did not lead him to envision the international system as fundamentally ‘fixed and unchanging’ (Little, Reference Little2007: 124; Scheuerman Reference Scheuerman2009: 112). Even the apparently fatalistic idea of an inescapable ‘security dilemma’ famously coined by Herz leaves space for global reform (Herz, Reference Herz1951; Booth and Wheeler, Reference Booth and Wheeler2008). Many core Realist concepts and themes are by no means intrinsically opposed to so-called ‘idealistic’ dreams of fundamental global reform.Footnote 28

Of course, some will surely hesitate before accepting the suggestion that the very idea of ‘Realism’ is perhaps flawed; they will prefer to hold onto the term and the rich intellectual tradition with which it has been associated. So what might they take from the exposition here?

First, the widespread insistence among contemporary Realists that normative matters should be cleanly separated from the proper confines of Realist social science needs at the very least to be attenuated. Of course, classical Realists were also committed to rigorous scholarship.Footnote 29 Yet they seem to have understood that especially in a changing (empirical) social universe, questions about ‘what should or ought to be’ inevitably overlap somewhat with questions about what ‘is’. Systematic scholarship about global politics thus always found itself forced to deal not only with existing empirical regularities, but the possibilities for change and transformation inherent in those trends. As they persuasively argued (and aptly predicted), international politics would in fact soon move in increasingly postnational directions (e.g. the emergence of the EU). Given the dynamic character of social reality, in short, even the most hard-headed empiricist would have to acknowledge not only possibilities for change latent in existing social reality, but ultimately take a moral and political stance on the question of what form such changes ideally should take. At times, the roles of ‘scientist’ and ‘advocate’ unavoidably overlapped. Not surprisingly, writers like Carr and Morgenthau saw no fundamental contradiction between such roles, though of course they did worry about naïve conflations of the ‘is’ and ‘ought’ as found, for example, in some varieties of one-world global reformism. Yet a rigid insistence on clearly separating ‘scientific’ Realism from normative questions was no less problematic and unattractive. It risked distorting the dynamic and fundamentally historical character of social reality, leading scholars mistakenly to believe that they could close their eyes to the many moral and political questions directly generated by a social reality always to some extent ‘in flux’. Not surprisingly perhaps, the implicit view of international reality found in a great deal of contemporary Realist theory too often seems unrealistically static and ahistorical, and its moral and political implications correspondingly overcautious and institutionally conservative.Footnote 30

Second, the account provided here strongly supports the efforts of some recent theorists to develop what we might describe as a richer account of the social and indeed sociological underpinnings of the state system. For reform-minded classical Realists, a crucial theoretical category was ‘supranational society’ or, alternately, ‘world community’, whose realization they considered indispensable to the innumerable integrative tasks presently performed more-or-less successfully by nationally based political entities. Only with its development, they argued, might a postnational polity prove workable: ‘laws are obeyed because the community accepts them as corresponding’, and not even primarily because of the state’s monopoly over the use of force (Niebuhr, Reference Niebuhr1953: 22). A global polity resting on an integrated global community or society would alone prove able to limit the mobilization of organized violence to exceptional circumstance. Only then could the specter of a worldwide ‘totalitarian monster resting on feet of clay’ be warded off (Morgenthau, 1954: 482). So they hardly subscribed to a simplistic state-centered billiard-ball model of international politics, along the lines still found in a great deal of mainstream Realism, in which the central role of social and cultural ties between and among individual states is underplayed or badly misconstrued. Reminiscent at times of the English School of international thought, they in fact grappled with the theoretical and practical challenges of what scholars now aptly describe as ‘global community’ or ‘global society’.Footnote 31 Indeed, given the discussion above, recent English School debates about the changing nature of international society seem especially pertinent not only to the discussion here, but to any attempt to salvage some elements of Realist theory (Dunne, Reference Dunne1998; Buzan, Reference Buzan2004). Constructivists have also rightly insisted on the centrality of a richer social and indeed sociological understanding of the underpinnings of global politics (Wendt, Reference Wendt1999). Any viable restatement of Realist theory will need to follow their examples and move toward a richer social theory of the state system than its proponents have typically succeeded in doing. And perhaps both the English School and Constructivists might gain as well by paying closer attention to mid-century Realism’s distinctive sociological account of international politics, which at least in some ways anticipated their more recent worries about Neorealism’s manifest sociological gaps.Footnote 32

Third, even if mid-century Realist thinking about supranational society remains in some ways incomplete, it potentially provides a useful corrective to what Craig Calhoun has aptly described as the ‘thin conception of social life, commitment, and belonging’ which still plagues a great deal of Cosmopolitan-minded global reformism, just as it plagued overly naïve models of global reform criticized at mid-century by Realists like Niebuhr and Morgenthau (2003: 96). Notwithstanding their internal disagreements, the reform-minded Realists discussed here would all have greeted with (understandable) skepticism the recent claim of one prominent cosmopolitan theorist that proponents of a global constitutional order need not worry about the apparent lack of a global ‘people’ because ‘institutions create the demos’ (Archibugi, Reference Archibugi2008: 143). This type of naïve institutional fetishism badly obscures the necessary social (and political) presuppositions of successful reform, putting the cart before the horse so as potentially to imperil the admirable struggle for a postnational political order.

Yet it seems unfair to characterize classical Realist reformers as well-meaning yet anachronistic ‘classical nuclear one worlders’ whose advocacy of a nuclear omnistate ultimately reached ‘something of a conceptual impasse’ (Deudney, Reference Deudney2007: 251). Although Deudney admirably reconsiders Realist reformism, he – like Craig – occludes some of the pivotal pieces of the puzzle, in part because he lacks a sufficient sense of the full contours of reformist-minded Realist discourse.Footnote 33 First, his interpretation understates the extent to which the Realists endorsed reform for a variety of economic, technological, and security-related reasons. Second, at least some mid-century Realists (e.g. Schuman) did at least occasionally anticipate a model of global governance along relatively loose federal-republican lines, and not as a centralized world state. Third, and most important, it fails to give proper credit to the powerful intuition that a normatively attractive as well as viable global government would need to rest on a corresponding supranational society: the ‘hierarchical’ and potentially repressive attributes of statehood described by Realists might be effectively restrained by a fully developed world society able to reduce state coercion to acceptable proportions. So the indispensable functions attributed by Deudney to what he describes as a ‘republican “check and balance” authority arrangement’ might – or so many mid-century Realists hoped – be successfully performed by a highly integrative world society built up gradually over time, via reforms along the lines proposed by Mitrany and others (Deudney, Reference Deudney2007: 258).

To be sure, classical Realists still typically favored the eventual establishment of some traditional elements of statehood at postnational levels. ‘Global governance without global government’ might serve useful aims, they seemed to suggest, but only postnational states would prove up to the arduous tasks at hand, not the least of which was reducing the possibility of nuclear war. Even some recent enthusiasts for the idea of ‘global governance without government’ have begun to appreciate the basic soundness of this insight (Weiss, Reference Weiss2008). Before we rush to abandon the supposedly anachronistic view that global political organization requires a ‘statist’ and hierarchically-organized monopoly on organized violence, for example, one would do well to recall that even relatively loose federal republican systems (e.g. Switzerland) have arguably flourished only by maintaining a capacity to mobilize a preponderance of power resources. Some political systems (e.g. the 19th century German Bund, or the United States under the Articles of Confederation) in fact failed in part because of their weaknesses on this score. Deudney’s view that his alternative ‘could be completely lacking in the hierarchical admixtures that free polities have been compelled to adopt to navigate the treacherous realm of external anarchy’ obscures the fact that the state’s hierarchical and coercive functions will sometimes prove essential – even given a relatively integrated supranational society – to the performance of functions unrelated to international anarchy: government may need to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor, and thus successfully mobilize state power against privileged groups who refuse to follow the majority will; in the case of a prospective global polity, a universal prohibition on torture will have to be enforced – if necessary, by means of ‘hierarchical’ political institutions able to unleash force – against powerful member-states (e.g. the United States) (Deudney, Reference Deudney2007: 263). Although postnational ‘statehood’ will likely take new and unexpected forms, some minimal ‘hierarchical’ and indeed coercive functions will have to be performed by any prospective (democratic) global order. Whatever their theoretical faults, the classical Realists help remind us of this. Even the relatively decentralized system of ‘purely republican mutual restraint arrangement’ favored by Deudney will sometimes need to concentrate and centralize power resources – including force – in order to maintain its integrity (Deudney, Reference Deudney2007: 277). As such, it will need to rely – as Realists like Morgenthau and Niebuhr would have predicted – on fundamental elements of the modern ‘hierarchical’ state and its monopoly over decisive power resources.Footnote 34

For those who have yet to give up on the dream of a just global political order, a proper engagement with classical Realism – and its intellectual history – remains indispensable. And those who think that Realism’s reformist legacy remains of ‘mere’ historical interest would do well to recall Faulkner’s observation that the ‘past is not dead. In fact, it is not even past.’